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Saturday, 28 November 2015

Really gripping book. I powered through it in a weekend and became very antisocial. This installment closes off many of the open story arcs and resolves much of the plot. There is love, death, penalty and sacrifice, all the best ingredients for a quest. I'm thrilled that it looks as though there might be a fourth book. Can definitely recommend.

I
went shopping on Black Friday, only it was supermarket shopping and Black
Friday hasn’t quite reached rural New Zealand. I should add that I almost never
go shopping. That’s not true actually. I never go shopping; there you made me
say it.

My
longsuffering husband does the shopping and has done since the third child left
home. For a while he did it with the fourth child and then by himself. He
rather enjoys all the choosing and I absolutely-without-a-doubt-hate it. I used
to do it once upon a time. I dragged four small children around with me on
reins and in trolleys and could do it in record time. I also did it when we
lived in Market Harborough and had no car and I was required to carry all the
shopping a mile to my front door and arrive home with jelly arms and leaking
bottles of milk. That was in my former, very distracted life of being all
things to all family members and I didn’t notice
things quite so much.

There’s
something about the aisles and lighting nowadays which makes me leave my brain
in the turnstily thing you push your reluctant trolley through before you can
even begin the shopping process. On Friday I had a list, a very good list which
Husband and I share on Google Docs so we can change and update it without me
texting him to say, hey, ‘Don’t forget the red wine.’ Now I can sneak it onto
the list and watch in the list updates as he deletes it. I can write, Countdown-belly-hugging-knickers and he
can write, what size?

It’s like a
little communication war dance or a mating display. I love it. Husband probably
doesn’t but I am fortunate in that he’s imbued with amazing patience.

Husband
can update it on his phone because he has an android but my Windows 8 won’t let
me. Thanks to an obscure argument between Microsoft and Google, I have to
scurry home to my laptop to put WINE back on the list, only to watch him wipe
it off using his extremely obliging phone.

I’ve
said lots of times that I’m OCD and struggle with the offensive aisles full of
products of differing colour and shape facing in all sorts of directions. I
spend more time turning things around and putting things back which often means
I come out with lots of things that weren’t on the list and only some of the
items that were.

For instance I came home with a lonely butternut squash that
was bigger than all the rest and messed up the pattern in the crate. Now it
sits alone in my vegetable box and matches nothing else because it’s not a potato
or kumara. I’ve shut the lid on it and its fate will be sealed with the roast I’m
plotting today...or perhaps tomorrow. It’s sunny today and not all the grass is
the same length so I have other things to do.

In
an hour and a half, Husband can drive the distance to Hamilton and back (20
minutes each way) and do the shopping. On Friday it took me that long to drive
to Huntly (5 minutes each way) and do the shopping. In my defence I put many
things straight along the way, reshelved items abandoned in the wrong aisle and
had lots of meaningless chats.

In
the car park I almost lost my trolley into the side of a flash BMW parked next
to me but caught it at the last minute. That got me wondering why supermarkets
don’t think about their pedestrian-trolley-pushing-shoppers as they angle the
tarmac towards large storm drains at the edge. I also don’t know why they
direct us towards a path with pedestrian crossings and then shove massive lamp
posts in the centre for us to negotiate.

Needless
to say I had an interesting morning during which I did no writing. I
re-engineered the supermarket car park in my head in which all parking spaces
were single and to be entered face first in lines, enabling shoppers to access
the back of their vehicles and drive straight out. Behind each vehicle would be
two tiny bumps to park our trolleys against during unloading and stop them
wandering off to fill another vehicle with tangled metal and food. I put lots
of things right in the store and had different conversations with the same
lovely lady eight times as we passed in the aisles. I helped a lady find hair
dye for her daughter and then put all the boxes neatly facing forward.

I
spent way too much money.

I
didn’t get gluten free/dairy free bread and Husband had to go out again later
to a different supermarket.

COME FIND ME

Living and writing in New Zealand is a privilege

Writing is a way of purging the strange imaginary people from my head; they only shut up if I pretend to write down what they say. I am an English woman living in New Zealand, treading water and always out of my depth. Married with grown up children, I've been in love with the hottest soccer referee in New Zealand for almost quarter of a century.

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